With the rapid popularization of computers, electronic information to be handled by people is rapidly increasing. Such a vast amount of electronic information is generally stored individually with a keyword, and by designating this keyword, the desired electronic information can be retrieved.
As a method for attaching a keyword to such electronic information, there is a method disclosed in the document of Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. HEI 6-295318.
However, according to the aforementioned prior art keyword attaching method, calculation of the fidelity based on the fidelity calculating information and comparison with the threshold value must be repeated by the number of the registered keyword candidates, and this leads to a problem that much time is required for the image data registering work. Furthermore, it is required to preparatorily set and register appropriate fidelity calculating information and threshold value for each keyword candidate, and this also leads to a problem that the structuring of a keyword attaching system is accompanied by a troublesome hard work although the keyword attaching work itself is automatically executed.
On the other hand, there is a popularized electronic filing device for taking in images and documents by means of an input device, registering and managing then together with attachment information of a keyword or the like, retrieving them at need and printing the same by means of an output device. In this case, the user is required to remember individually registered keywords for retrieval, and since the keyword varies depending on the subjectivities of individual users, it is impossible to retrieve all that have identical images or documents by only one keyword.
In this regard, there can be considered an information processing device which defines a relevance ratio of a key (impressive word, image keyword or the like) with respect to an image in an attempt at retrieving an image and a document by the images they have and retrieves an image close to the image conceived by the operator with the above key and relevance ratio used as retrieval conditions in the image retrieving stage.
However, this information processing device is required to preparatorily set the relevance ratio of each image to the key besides the key. Then, the key and the relevance ratio are to be manually set one by one by the user, and therefore, the setting can be repeated by the number of the objective images to be registered. When there is an increased number of objective images and keys to be registered, the image data registering work becomes very hard, to a disadvantage.